Characterisation of ferritic stainless steel by Barkhausen techniques

Magneto-acoustic emission (MAE) and magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN) sensing techniques were developed and employed to characterise plastically deformed and heat-treated AISI 430 ferritic stainless steel samples. These results have been compared to the mechanical hardness, coercivity and residual stress of the samples. MAE and MBN were shown to decrease with increasing permanent material deformation. It was found that the inverse of MAE (absolute energy) and MBN (RMS) are linearly proportional to hardness. With increased deformation, the resultant change in dislocation density was found to effect material coercivity. It has been shown that the inverse of MAE absolute energy and MBN have an exponential relationship to the change in material coercivity. The results are explained in terms of the different mechanisms that effect dislocation-domain wall interactions. A new measurement parameter has been developed for microstructural characterisation called MAE absolute energy and has proved to be a useful quantitative method in MAE waveform measurement. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.